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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/29547126">The Brave Man Only Once</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/ifyouwereamelody/pseuds/ifyouwereamelody'>ifyouwereamelody</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Avatar: The Last Airbender</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Ambassador Katara (Avatar), F/M, Fire Lord Zuko, First Kiss, Fluff</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2021-02-19</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2021-02-19</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-15 20:01:15</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>2,257</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/29547126</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/ifyouwereamelody/pseuds/ifyouwereamelody</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>It’s been a slow process, learning to recognise the different masks his fear can wear, and now, somehow, it’s crept up on him all over again without him seeing it coming.</p><p>Which is how Zuko finds himself sat in a stuffy meeting room with a bunch of stuffy councillors, completely distracted from their stuffy talk by the way his heart is pounding.</p><p>It just—</p><p>It all happened so suddenly.</p><p> </p><p>Zuko is no stranger to fear, but the kind he feels with Katara is something completely new.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Katara &amp; Zuko (Avatar), Katara/Zuko (Avatar)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>22</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>262</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>The Brave Man Only Once</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>'The coward dies a thousand times, the brave man only once.'</p><p>Here I am flinging another fic out into the world without a proper proofread. Because, as always, I'm up too late and feeling too sleepy to run a coherent check now that I've finished writing. 'Why not wait until later and proofread before posting?' I have no answer to this, other than the fact that once I've finished a fic I can't really stand just leaving it sitting on my laptop. Gotta toss it into the ether.</p><p>So here! This kind of took on a life/direction of its own, but was originally inspired by a lovely prompt from a couple of wonderful friends. &lt;3</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Zuko has been afraid before.</p><p>Well—</p><p>Perhaps that’s too much of an understatement.</p><p>He lived half his life afraid, back when he wanted both nothing more and nothing less than to be a part of the charred, smouldering stain that was spreading slowly across the world. The boy he’d once  been was burned away and what was left behind had gone spinning, winded and reckless, across land and sea and sky alike, spurred into a heated panic of bad decision after bad decision as he tried to outrun something that was already sizzling in his bloodstream.</p><p>He turned back and forth between extremes so fast that finding his own convictions became impossible through the blur; too loud in the face of reason, too quiet when confronted with injustices, too quick to anger, too slow to reflect... He was a muddle of failures, and fear was his constant companion.</p><p>He’d thought that he recognised every part of it, understood its shape better than anyone.</p><p>And then came the crossroads.</p><p>Then came new goals, new anxieties, new <em>friends</em>, and from all that he found a new kind of fear — the kind that comes with finally having something worth losing. This was multi-faceted, ever-shifting as the world brought forward an unstemmable flow of experiences made unfamiliar by the new lenses colouring his vision. It was the shaking of his hands as he stalled outside his uncle’s tent, the clench in his gut as he parted ways with new-found friends and watched them ride off to war, the sharp, splintering terror of blue light snapping eagerly towards someone he couldn’t bear to lose; all painful and sickening, all harder to bear than something warped hurriedly into anger or spite, but all irrefutably more valuable, more meaningful than the sparks that used to sting at his insides.</p><p>It’s been a slow process, learning to recognise the different masks his fear can wear, and now, somehow, it’s crept up on him all over again without him seeing it coming.</p><p>Which is how he finds himself sat in a stuffy meeting room with a bunch of stuffy councillors, completely distracted from their stuffy talk by the way his heart is pounding.</p><p>It just—</p><p>It all happened so <em>suddenly</em>.</p><p>
  <em>‘Ready for another hour of Hae-sun being passive aggressive?’</em>
</p><p>
  <em>He groans, slumping in his seat. </em>
</p><p>
  <em>‘Gods, she’s going to try to undermine the new health policies again, isn’t she?’</em>
</p><p>
  <em>The laugh that Katara lets out is wry, crisp as the papers that she’s shuffling around on the table in front of her as they wait for the rest of the council to arrive.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>‘Almost definitely. I don’t think she agrees with anything that involves universal access.’ Her hand reaches out, as if of its own accord, to land on back of his neck. She doesn’t look up, doesn’t allow her attention to stray from her notes, but her fingers find the knots in his muscles with unnerving accuracy, and he feels himself start to relax as she presses some of the tension out of him. ‘They’re good policies, Zuko. They’re going to make such a difference to your people, you just need to hold firm against her and her supporters.’</em>
</p><p>
  <em>He grunts low in the back of his throat and shuffles his chair a little closer to hers, scanning over the trade reports that she’s still rifling through.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>‘Yeah? That easy, is i—’</em>
</p><p>
  <em>The question stalls on his lips as she lifts her head, her eyes flickering when she finds him closer than expected. The catch in her breath is too loud in the sudden silence, and all at once Zuko’s intolerably aware of everything about her — the surprised quirk of her eyebrows, the light, misty smell that floats around her, the hand that still rests, motionless now, on the back of his neck.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>She doesn’t move, except for the journey that her gaze is taking across his face, down the slope of his nose, landing for a moment on his lips before flitting quickly back up to meet his eyes again.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>He doesn’t move, except for the heartbeat that’s practically vibrating through him, so strong that he can hear the blood rushing in his ears.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>They hold for a second that feels like it was always going to happen, like this was their starting point and everything that came before it was back-written to ensure they ended up here. Then his name is gliding out on her breath and she’s sinking in towards him, halting and hesitant, eyes fixed on his face for reassurance that, yes, this is okay. His pulse ticks up higher with every inch she closes between them, his breathing shallowing out as her fingers thread loosely into the hair at his nape, and even though she’s been freed from whatever force was holding them before, he still feels as though he’s frozen in place.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>He sees her notice, watches her lose her nerve to the stiffness in his shoulders just as she gets close enough for him to feel her breath against his face. Her eyes widen, the flush on her cheeks morphing from delicate pink to a bright, mortified red, and in a snap she’s pulled away, drawn her hand back as if she’s been burnt, and launched into a stumbling apology.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>‘Oh gods, sorry, I don’t know what— I clearly misread—’ She chokes, a strangled, humourless laugh rasping in her throat. ‘Shit. Zuko, I am so, so—’</em>
</p><p>
  <em>‘No, Katara—’</em>
</p><p>
  <em>‘Good morning, Lord Zuko! Ambassador Katara! Lovely day, isn’t it?’</em>
</p><p><em>Of course. Of </em>course<em> he’s become unstuck thirty seconds out of synch, too late to keep himself from fucking up. Too late to try to understand what’s just happened well enough that he might be able to explain it to her. Too late to tell her that apologising is the last thing she should be doing as the council members start trickling into the room and she turns emphatically away from him, lips pressed tight together, face still flaming through the furrows of her frown.</em></p><p>‘Lord Zuko?’</p><p>He flinches as a voice rips him abruptly out of his own thoughts and drops him back into the meeting; the table of council members is watching him, staring with raised brows that beg the answer to a question he doesn’t know, but Katara refuses to look his way.</p><p>‘Uh— Councilman Anurak?’</p><p>The older man, one of the more agreeable members of Zuko’s council, smiles perplexedly at him from the other end of the table.</p><p>‘I was just asking for confirmation, my Lord, that the details regarding your journey to Ba Sing Se next week are to your liking?’</p><p>‘Oh. Yes. Yes, everything’s fine. Thank you.’</p><p>‘And you still wish to stay with your uncle rather than the quarters that King Kuei has offered you?’</p><p>‘Definitely, yes. It’s been too long since I last saw him.’</p><p>Anurak nods, not unlike Iroh himself in the kind twinkle that lives in his eyes, and Zuko feels the pressure of the room lift off him as the council settles back into outlining the schedule for his visit to the Earth Kingdom. The details have been laboured so thoroughly by this point that he could probably recite the whole plan in his sleep, and its discussion leaves him plenty of space to sink back into thoughts of the moments before everyone else arrived.</p><p>
  <em>What the fuck was that?</em>
</p><p>She was going to kiss him. He’s sure about that much, at least. <em>Katara</em> was going to <em>kiss </em>him. She was <em>right there</em>, leaning in, all shimmering and softening in anticipation...</p><p>And he’d managed to make her think he didn’t want her. Somehow. <em>Fuck, you idiot.</em></p><p>Because of course he wanted her, <em>wants</em> her. He knows that. Agni, s<em>he</em> knows that — it’s not as if either of them has made much of a secret of how they feel. Things have been said, and things have been understood, and together they’ve slipped into something glowing and warm. Soft. These days, he smiles at her without a thought as to how lopsided his mouth is under the tug of his scar, and she touches him constantly — to soothe, to pester, to steady — running her fingers over him like it’s nothing and everything.</p><p>There’s been no urgency to it, just a slow acceleration of this easy kind of physicality between them that wasn’t there before. Nothing unclear, nothing uncertain. So the way he’s feeling about it now... It’s all new, fallen over him in the space of a breath, in the gap between lips, and he doesn’t understand it.</p><p>He runs it back through his mind again, again, maps out the contours of it in his hands and watches the way it moves; the pounding of his heart, the quaking of his chest, the way his vision seemed to tunnel down to the barest sliver of blue eyes and—</p><p>There’s no mistaking it.</p><p>This isn’t a new feeling, no. It’s an old one, perhaps the oldest one he knows, appearing to him with a new form, a new face.</p><p>Spirits, he’s <em>terrified.</em> Absolutely fucking terrified of bringing this thing that’s been building between him and Katara out of its gentle, swaying space and into the bright light of the real world. It feels like a line to cross, somehow, a whole step up after the smooth curve that their escalation has taken. It feels like it might turn them into something that people could judge.</p><p>Could they survive that? They both know first-hand the tendency that the world has to try and pull things apart. Do they have too much to lose in opening themselves up to the sharp clarity that drawing even closer together could bring?</p><p>And what if all the contentment she finds in their connection rests on the ease of how things are right now? What if they try to solidify something that’s meant to stay fluid, and Katara, with her hands that find power and peace in all that flows, realises that he isn’t what she wants? He’s been found lacking too many times before to be able to stop the thought from dancing through his mind.</p><p>But then...</p><p>His mind churns as he brings the meeting to a vague, underwhelming close, distracted as he thinks back over the look on her face as the softness in her eyes disappeared and she pulled away. She doesn’t move from her seat next to him, focussing on writing out her conclusions from the meeting, but the stiffness in her posture is still there; she’s sitting just that bit skewed, tilted a fraction away from him that speaks volumes.</p><p>In trying to protect it, he’s still putting what he has with her at risk.</p><p>He has to at least <em>try</em>, doesn’t he? He’s faced bigger fears before.</p><p>The last of the councilmembers filters out of the room, and he’s left sitting by her side, his gaze skimming over her as she works. The distance between his fingers and hers feels enormous, almost impassable for limbs numbed by the adrenaline that’s firing through his veins, but he just about manages; his hand finds her wrist, and she startles, <em>finally</em> turning to meet his eyes.</p><p>And it’s that easy.</p><p>Suddenly, just as quickly as the feeling appeared earlier, he’s not worried anymore. Not afraid. Maybe there’ll be repercussions later, maybe not. Perhaps he’ll have fallout to clear up once he emerges from the eye of this particular storm. But here, whilst he’s in it, all that he has to think about is her — just her — and when since the first time she sent a smile his way has she ever been anything other than a sanctuary?</p><p>Fear has dictated a lot of things in his life, but this isn’t going to be one of them.</p><p>‘Can we—’ His voice hasn’t quite gotten the memo, breaking as he speaks, and he coughs to clear his throat of a tension that the rest of his body has already released. ‘Can we pick up where we left off?’</p><p>Her expression morphs from one of wary, slightly pained curiosity to something that looks like the way he feels when she touches him: simultaneously more vulnerable and more sheltered than ever.</p><p>‘Zuko, what are you—’</p><p>He stays silent as she tails off, waiting just long enough to see understanding spark in her eyes, to watch the smile start to curl at her mouth; just long enough to know that she wants what he wants. And then his hand is on the back of her neck — a mirror of the way she’d held him before — and he’s pulling her in, and the brush falls with a clatter from her grip as their lips meet.</p><p>It takes them no time at all to settle in the kiss, their rhythm set for them immediately by some deep, drawing synchronicity that he thinks must have been there from the start, hidden in their heartbeats. Katara’s fingers wind into the fabric of his tunic, tugging him closer across the gap between their chairs as she sighs into his mouth, and he almost laughs at how wrong he’d been — this is no leap, no sharp step up, just an extension of the back and forth that they’ve been sharing, easy as breathing, this whole time. She winds her arms up around his neck, and he tangles his fingers in her hair, and she opens up to the teasing of his tongue against her lips, and he—</p><p><em>Gods</em>.</p><p>He kisses her.</p><p>And by Agni if it isn’t the least frightening thing he’s ever done.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>I'm realising that this is the first T-rated thing I've written in a fair while, and that I may have forgotten who to build decent tension in a sfw way. Oops. </p><p>Hope everyone's doing okay and staying safe. &lt;3</p><p>Let me know what you think!</p></blockquote></div></div>
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